Tuesday, 20 December 2011

I just returned from a
meeting-filled week in Brasil at Oracle Open World Latin America in Sao Paulo. This event
brings together the best of OpenWorld to Latin America and features the usual
star studded line up of product development and customer speakers. It was also a good opportunity to meet with friends and colleagues in Latin America and Brasil and spend some quality time with them in Sao Paulo traffic!

OpenWorld in Latin America, as in San Francisco, is co-located in time with JavaOne and I must say that the level of interest in Java was truly
outstanding. In many of the sessions – including Mike Lehmanns WebLogic 12c
Session – there was standing room only!

In a world in which we
are constantly hearing about economic challenges and sovereign debt defaults,
it’s nice to visit a country where there is tremendous energy, where it’s all
about optimism and growth, and where road traffic is a impediment to economic
activity!

The week was filled with meetings with prospective and existing
customers who wanted to know more about Exalogic.

The meetings with existing customers included a large
E-commerce site that is rolling out their ATG implementation on Exalogic; a Co-operative Bank that is re-platforming
their middleware and SOA infrastructure on Exalogic, a telematics firm that is
rolling out new applications; and, many more….

Some interesting conversations I had included:

•Mobile
Operator

–Traffic
on their mobile data network has increased by a factor of 7x since January and
they are struggling to deal with 4 million prepaid top ups per day on their
pre-paid mobile infrastructure.

–Their
interest in Exalogic is to re-platform their entire provisioning and billing
infrastructure to cope with growth

•Holding company with business ranging from Gas distribution, to broadcasting, to Education to Retail, etc

–Experiencing
performance issues today and fear for the future given their Oracle Apps / E-business
suite consolidation / single instance efforts which increase volumes
significantly as more and more lines of business are brought online. Increases in things like number of invoices processed expected to factor 5x over the next 12 months. Response times for price calculations for example in one business unit alone, of 54 hours were a barrier to business!

–Their
interest in Exalogic is to enable them to have a consistent, high performance
platform that can fulfill their response times and tps requirements as they
move more and more lines of business onto their E-Business suite environment

•E-commerce
site

–Who
said they were experiencing 100% growth in revenues year on year and need to be
able to support this growth in time for the Olympics and the World Cup

–Their
interest in Exalogic is based on the need to support lower response times for
E-commerce and more transactions on less hardware

•Government
Tax Department

–Who
extensively use both commercial and open source software and are experiencing
significant scalability challenges as the number of transactions that they have
to process increases

– Their interest in Exalogic is to support higher
volumes for their Oracle Forms (18,000 workstations) and WebLogic / Java
infrastructure

•Managed Hosting / Cloud Service Provider

–Who has managed hosting services today, and is looking at how they can move to an outsourcing model in which they can provide Cloud Services, but also application outsourcing. Their keen interest was to understand the way in which they should proceed - whether to replicate what Amazon is doing with EC2, whether to spin up a virtualized environment for commodity hosting of windows systems, or whether to focus on a premium segment of the market for outsourcing of application infrastructure for transactional applications

– Their interest in Exalogic and Exadata is to power their platform for hosting mainstream transactional applications that run their customers business - like E-commerce, online banking, etc.

All the conversations we had in Brasil were focused on the need to
power future growth. To deal with more transactions than ever before, the need
to keep control of spiraling hardware and data center footprints as part of
that expansion, and to set course for a
simpler future and align applications with underlying systems. Many customers were realizing that simply virtualizing the data center is not enough for transactional applications - they need to focus on the application and choose the right infrastructure for running those applications!

One notable take away for me - apart from the fact that it's a LOONNG way back from Sao Paulo to San Francisco - is that all my discussions at OpenWorld with customers and partners were
focused on the upside potential.

On the future.

On powering the future

On a future that is lined with growth

On all that is possible.

Refreshing!

I really enjoyed the week there - a big thank you to my host Eudis for organizing a full and productive week!